An Owners' Question

A frequent question is "won't the Township have to take over the common areas?" The honest answer requires distinguishing between what can happen and what typically does happen in Pennsylvania. Here is what the law actually says and the realistic options the community has.

The Township probably will not take ownership, and it does not have to.

Pennsylvania townships generally do not accept HOA common areas when associations dissolve. Across the state, the vast majority of stormwater facilities in residential subdivisions remain privately owned by homeowners associations or successor entities. The 2023 report on Common Interest Ownership Communities by the Pennsylvania Joint State Government Commission confirms this pattern at scale. Cumberland Township is not unusual in this regard.

This sounds like a problem, but it isn't. The land doesn't disappear, and the law doesn't allow it to be abandoned. What happens instead is that the community decides, in the termination agreement itself, who takes over.

What the law actually requires.

Two layers of Pennsylvania law apply, and both stay in force regardless of whether the Association exists.

Pennsylvania's Storm Water Management Act of 1978 (Act 167) and Cumberland Township Chapter 20 (Stormwater Management) require that stormwater facilities continue to be maintained. The obligation attaches to the land and to whoever owns it, not to the HOA as a corporate entity. If the Association dissolves but the land is conveyed to a successor, the successor inherits the obligation. If the land is divided among adjacent owners, those owners inherit it. If it's held as tenants in common by all 108 of us, we collectively inherit it.

The Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code § 705 (53 P.S. § 10705) gives the Township a statutory backstop: if the responsible private entity fails to maintain stormwater facilities, the Township can perform the maintenance itself and assess the cost back to the property owner. The Township doesn't have to take ownership to make sure the system works.

The realistic options for our common areas.

When the community drafts a termination agreement under 68 Pa.C.S. § 5220, it specifies what happens to the three common element lots and the stormwater system. Four options are realistically available.

A successor stormwater entity. The most common path: form a narrow, single-purpose entity whose only job is maintaining the stormwater system and the Common Elements that contain it. Annual cost per owner is a fraction of current HOA dues, the entity covers basin inspection, vegetation management, and occasional repair. No architectural review. No fines. No assessments for things that aren't stormwater. No Board with rule-making authority.

Convey to adjacent owners. The three Common Element lots (H-1, H-2, H-3 on the recorded plat) are small. Each is adjacent to existing unit owners. They can be deeded to adjacent owners, divided and assigned, with the recipients accepting the small responsibility of maintaining their slice. This is particularly workable for the lots that are essentially grass strips with no stormwater function.

Distribute as tenants in common. Each of the 108 unit owners becomes a co-owner of the Common Elements at the same 0.9259% interest already specified in the Declaration. Legally workable; governance-wise inconvenient. Better as a fallback than as a primary plan.

Sell or donate to a third party. Unlikely for small, non-commercial grass lots. Possible for a willing conservation easement holder if the parcels have ecological value.

What it would cost if the Township did take over.

While Cumberland Township is unlikely to volunteer to take ownership, owners should know what the cost picture looks like if it ever did. Three structural scenarios exist under Pennsylvania municipal practice.

Scenario A: Absorbed into the general township budget. Maintenance becomes a line item paid via existing property taxes spread across all Cumberland Township parcels. The marginal cost to a Patriots Choice owner above current Township taxes would be functionally zero. This is the most owner-favorable outcome and the least likely; municipalities rarely volunteer to take on ongoing maintenance burdens without dedicated funding.

Scenario B: Per-parcel stormwater fee. A growing number of Pennsylvania municipalities have adopted dedicated stormwater fees to fund MS4 (federal Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) compliance costs. Typical per-parcel stormwater fees in Pennsylvania municipal practice currently run $30 to $80 per year. Patriots Choice owners would pay that fee whether or not the Township directly maintained our facilities, since the fee applies to all residential parcels in the municipality.

Scenario C: Special assessment district. Some Pennsylvania townships use special service areas in which the actual cost of maintaining specific infrastructure is assessed only to the properties served. The annual cost per Patriots Choice owner would approximate the actual maintenance cost: $4,500 to $6,250 divided across 108 units, or roughly $42 to $58 per owner per year. This is essentially identical to what a private successor stormwater entity would cost; it just gets collected through the tax bill instead of HOA dues.

In all three scenarios, the per-owner cost runs meaningfully below the $150 per unit assessed in the 2026 HOA budget. The realistic answer remains that the Township probably continues the current arrangement and the maintenance stays with a private entity (a reformed Association or a successor stormwater entity). But the cost ceiling, even in the worst owner-funded case, is well below where current HOA dues sit.

What we'd actually pay.

Today's assessments cover much more than stormwater: architectural review apparatus, enforcement, Board liability insurance, management company fees, reserves for collective costs, dues administration, and so on. The stormwater portion of all that is a small slice. A successor entity focused only on stormwater compliance carries only that slice, the rest of the line items go away when the broader Association does. The exact savings would be specified in the termination agreement and reviewed against actual maintenance bids, but the structural math favors a meaningful reduction in ongoing costs.

What this looks like in practice.

None of this is hypothetical legal theory. The legal framework for a successor stormwater entity is well-trodden in Pennsylvania: a small unincorporated association or single-purpose nonprofit, with bylaws limited to stormwater compliance and inspection, with annual dues at a level that covers the actual cost of the work, and with no enforcement authority over anything else. It is exactly the kind of narrowly-scoped governance our community would have if the Patriots Choice Declaration had been written today rather than in 2005.